As The Gazette’s Aaron Derfel reported on Thursday, it was Beaulieu alone who persuaded Health Minister Réjean Hébert to order the transfer of the Lachine Hospital from the bilingual McGill hospital system to the local public health network.

Beaulieu raised the question of the hospital’s language status at a meeting with the minister on modernizing the hospital.

He had been invited to the meeting because, the chair of the hospital’s council of doctors, dentists and pharmacists told Derfel, “we wouldn’t have got the meeting without Beaulieu.”

Hébert followed up by issuing the order in a letter Dec. 20 to the director of the Montreal health and social services agency.

He has since been forced to retreat by fierce resistance from francophones.

In a second letter dated Jan. 11, which Derfel obtained, Hébert instructed the agency to hold consultations that will inevitably show overwhelming opposition to the transfer.

But Hébert’s original concession to Beaulieu showed that the PQ was willing to sacrifice even the quality of health care for French-speaking Quebecers to internal political considerations.

By all accounts, conditions at the hospital improved after the McGill University Health Centre took it over in 2008.

As part of the officially bilingual MUHC, the Lachine Hospital was allowed under the French Language Charter to use more English.

Still, it continued to serve the French-speaking residents of the West Island in French, as all Quebec hospitals are required to do.

Some francophones even credit the MUHC with saving the 100-year-old hospital, after it was nearly run into the ground under the same government agency to which Hébert would have returned it.

But none of this matters to Beaulieu, in the campaign he has long been waging against the McGill hospital system.

It’s to stop what the minister responsible for the French Language Charter, Diane De Courcy, has called “slippage toward institutional bilingualism” in areas under Quebec jurisdiction, including the hospitals.

So the proposed legislation would make French the “normal and everyday language” in which the government, its ministries and other public agencies “address others and are addressed.”

The hawks may have lost a battle over the Lachine Hospital. But a PQ war against English in public services, including health, may be only beginning.

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